A simple Tweet from Talent Zoo CEO Rick Myers sent that little hamster in my brain off onto a furious wheel-rotating rampage this morning. I’m the sort of person who is very hesitant to get my company to adopt something that’s “free” because nothing is truly “free.”
Everything has an associated cost with it, whether it’s represented in time or in dollars or both.
During my Google Docs experiment I found out that although I didn’t have to throw down $299 for a student copy of Microsoft Office 2007, I had to spend an inordinate amount of time transferring Word and Excel documents into Google Docs, and even once I had them transferred they were rarely imported in a fully functional state.
After 4-7 weeks of that, I gave up and bought Office 2007, because the $299 was less expensive than the amount of time I spent futzing with my Google Docs documents. Haven’t looked back since.
When I have to recommend new products and services at work, things like content management systems, I am very hesitant to cling to the first acceptable “free” solution because of the hidden costs associated with it. I tend to think about things like:
- “What happens if it breaks – who will support it?”
- “How much modification will it take to integrate it with existing systems?
- “How long will it take the IT team to learn this technology – are there any books, certification programs, or training materials available?”
- “What happens if we find a major bug – how long will it take to develop a patch for it?”
- “How long will it take the users of the system to learn how to use it – is it easier to learn this system than the others?”
- “How will this system be an improvement over our existing system?”
- “Will this system be better than any of the alternatives for our specific needs?”
And so forth – I think about this for products that aren’t free either, but in the small amount of experience I have had “free” solutions have almost always lost to solutions that have a definite price tag.
So my question to all of you readers, visitors, and disappointed organic search users looking for Facebook.NET development tips is this:
Would you give something a second look just because the visible dollar cost is “zero,” or do you a go through a similar cost/benefits thought process like mine?
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Comments 4
Note: After writing this I noticed that I look at OSS only, not free (beer) in general. Anyway:
Yes. I agree that some parts of your list of questions are valid and very important. Support, for one, is something that I wouldn’t want to miss depending on the type of product. But for lots of commercial software you have to pay extra for that as well, so this is more a “Is payed support available at _all_?” question for me. Big OSS projects seem to be backed by companies offering a solution here.
I would like to challenge some points of yours.
2) Same issue with commercial stuff, _unless_ you tend to buy from one company only. Redmond? I agree that you can hardly beat that integration for “free”. But in general I’d argue that this point is moot.
3) Same. Most (serious) OSS projects offer reasonable documentation. Certification programs? Those are extra expenses for a limited amount of value (if any) imo. Books? O’Reilly, apress cover _a lot_. Bottom line: The techs have to learn new software. One way or another.
4) Good point. I _could_ argue against this (The famous “At least you would be _able_ to patch it yourself if you’d want to”), but that’s not really a serious option I’d consider for business stuff. Nice for personal things if you happen to be a developer, but as a company you want your stuff to just work.
5) This is really quite similar to 3 and I tend to give the same answer. No matter what the software costs, your users/admins have to learn to use it. Maybe (a biiig one) commercial documentation is better in general. I’d check this on a case by case base.
6) How is this related to free or not? This only applies if you want to _replace_ a commercial product with a free one. If you start fresh (Quoting you: “Recommend(ing) _new_ products and services at work”, emphasis mine) this is a non-issue. Of course: Don’t replace a working solution for something worse. But this point seems still strange.
7) Again, unrelated to free or not in general. Yes, sure. Compare all alternatives. Compare feature sets, risks, support and – price. This is nothing that should be handled in a special way for free software imo.
But to get back to the real question: Yes, I tend to favour the free (but preferable in both ways) stuff. That’s more an emotional/ideological thing though and includes my own commitment working hard to understand/master the software afterwards. Just because it is free/libre.
Hope my english is good enough to make my point. Got to this post (indirectly) via twitter and had to RT it. It’s a very interesting question!
Posted 27 Feb 2009 at 2:35 pm ¶Ben,
Thanks for the ReTweet! I ask those questions for everything, not just free stuff – question 6 is relevant because a new, free system might be an improvement over an existing system simply because if it does all of the same stuff at a lower cost then that’s a cost improvement.
Same with question 7. It’s making an apples to apples comparison with free/commercial goods – when the dollar price of something is zero I have to convert the “time cost” of it into dollars.
In my empirical experience most free products have been more expensive to support and implement simply because they don’t have as many features, aren’t supported as well, don’t play nice with existing systems, and many other such reasons.
The other reason is support – many free products don’t offer much in the way of organized support at all, even premium support (MySQL is a big exception to this, as are some other high-profile open source projects.) It’s just something I’ve observed based on my experience with a VERY limited set of technological needs for my business – it could be totally different in a different sector.
Posted 27 Feb 2009 at 3:18 pm ¶And your English was fine, by the way :p
Posted 27 Feb 2009 at 3:18 pm ¶Exactly! First day in any real economics course TNSTAAFL – “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
Posted 28 Feb 2009 at 11:03 am ¶Post a Comment